LINGUIST List 14.2442

Mon Sep 15 2003

Calls: Journal Call/Genres of Digital Documents

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

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Directory

Call for Papers
Special issue on
Genres of Digital Documents
To appear in
Information Technology & People
Papers due Monday 1 March 2004
We invite papers for a special issue of the journal Information
Technology & People on Genres of Digital Documents. Genres are
communicative actions with a socially recognized purposes and common
aspects of form (such as newsletters, FAQs, and homepages). Genres are
situated in complex communicative practices; they are anchored in
specific institutions and processes and apply to physical as well as
electronic documents. Genres are useful because they make
communications more easily recognizable and understandable by
recipients and more easily generated by senders. Thus, the study of
genres, besides enhancing our understanding of information search and
use, may also provide insights into organizational and community
structuring.
In a digital environment, documents have functionality as well as
form and content but in many ways the contextual clues to ascertain
functionality are missing. As a result, it is becoming increasingly
clear that the successful use of digital media requires the emergence
of new or transformed genres of digital communication. Genre provides
a certain fixity in communication and provides conventions for
navigating broad information spaces, helping to mitigate "information
overload." In practice, genres disambiguate the information
environment, making it easier for users to categorically ignore
certain communications while attending carefully to others, based on
the perception of genre and the conformity of an instance to its
genre.
Suggested topics for the special issue include:
o Issues in the transformation of print genres to digital form
o The evolution of genres of digital documents
o Genre theory and its application to digital documents
o Emergent genres
o Investigations of genre in use
o Analyses of particular document genres
o Genres in digital search and classification
o Genres in non-text digital documents
o Genres for electronic commerce
o Designing systems in support of and using genre
o Genres that spill over into other applications
o Limitations and presuppositions of genres
Special issue editors
Kevin Crowston and Barbara Kwasnik
Syracuse University School of Information Studies
4-206 Centre for Science and Technology
Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 USA
Email: {crowston,bkwasnik}syr.edu
Instructions to authors
1. Each paper must have a title page that includes the title of the
paper, full name of all authors, and complete addresses including
affiliation(s), telephone number(s), and e-mail address(es).
2. The first page of the manuscript should include the title and a
300-word abstract of the paper.
3. Papers should contain original material and not be previously
published, or currently submitted for consideration elsewhere.
4. Papers should be submitted on the ITP website at
http://www.itandpeople.org/
Important dates
Papers due: Monday 1 March 2004
Notification of acceptance: Tuesday 1 June 2004
Final copy due: Monday 16 August 2004
Anticipated publication: November 2004
-
Kevin Crowston
Syracuse University
School of Information Studies Fax: +1 (315) 443-5806
4-206 Centre for Science and Technology EMail: crowstonsyr.edu
Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 USA
Web: http://crowston.syr.edu/